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Forum: Mystery of the missing biography / A look at the life of Alan Blumlein

By BARRY FOX

WHEN BBC Bristol broadcast a Radio 4 programme on eccentric genius Alan
Blumlein earlier this year, the producer’s office was, in its own words,
inundated with calls from listeners. Many of the callers asked if there
was a biography they could read. Thereby hangs a tale almost as extraordinary
as that of Blumlein’s life and mysterious death.

The story of Alan Dower Blumlein is the stuff that Hollywood movies
are made of. He invented stereo sound recording in the early 1930s, became
the driving force behind the first all-electronic television system which
made Britain a world leader in the late 1930s and then moved on to work
on the radar systems which helped Britain to win the war against Germany.
He died when a Halifax bomber, which was testing the first radar to give
air crews an electronic map image of the ground below, crashed near Ross-on-Wye.
Sabotage was suspected but never proved.

Despite Blumlein’s extraordinary contribution to electronics and broadcasting,
no biography has ever appeared. And it now looks likely that even the 50th
anniversary of Blumlein’s death, in June 1992, will pass without a biography
being published. This situation stems from the fact that vital biographical
material relating to the inventor has passed into the hands of one man,
Francis Paul Thomson of Watford, who has not yet produced the book he has
been promising for nearly 18 years. While the book remains unfinished, other
researchers are unable to gain access to the historical material Thomson
has collected. And as the BBC researchers found when making their radio
programme, every year first-hand memories of the inventor fade further into
the mists of time.

At the time of his death, in June 1942, Blumlein was less than 40 years
old, but had secured 128 patents, one for every six weeks of his working
life. Patents are legal documents and by definition dull to read. Blumlein
wrote little else for public consumption, and certainly nothing in lay language.
This is hardly surprising. He was far too busy inventing to write anything
that was not strictly necessary. In any case, although an electronics wizard,
he could not read until he was 12, would not read complete books until after
he was married and was an appalling speller.

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When Blumlein was killed even a brief announcement was postponed for
two years. The British government feared it would cheer Hitler to hear that
a key designer of the radar systems which were saving allied shipping in
the Atlantic was dead. After the war, there were security and secrecy restrictions,
and Blumlein’s colleagues were too busy rebuilding their own lives to think
about fighting to declassify documents and writing books. Even Blumlein’s
wife had not known what he was working on when he died.

The fact that Blumlein’s work spread over such a wide field, crossing
the boundaries of sound, film, television, telephone and military technologies,
deterred potential biographers, too.

The first man to start researching a biography was an engineer, B. J.
Benzimra. In 1967 he wrote a superb article (published in Electronics and
Power, June 1967) which called for reminiscences from those who knew Alan
Blumlein to be sent to the inventor’s son, Simon. Benzimra said at the time
that his dream was to ‘raise this for gotten man from the dead’.

The next year, in May 1968, at a seminar on Blumlein’s life organised
by the British Kinematograph Sound and Television Society (BKSTS), Simon
Blumlein spoke about his father and said he hoped with Benzimra to write
a biography ‘even if it never gets published’.

Unfortunately, Benzimra had to abandon the project through ill health
(he later died). It was taken over by Thomson. In September 1972, Thomson
sent out standard letters for publication to electronics industry magazines,
for instance to the editor of the Journal of the British Kinematograph,
Sound and TV Society, explaining that a biography of Alan Blumlein was ‘in
preparation’. The letter was an ‘urgent request’ for ‘all who had personal
contact with him (Blumlein), however slight, or would like to give an assessment
of his position in the history of technology’, to write to Thomson at his
Watford address.

Thomson also wrote personally to those he thought might be able to provide
either written or tape-recorded notes. ‘Rather hesitantly,’ he wrote, ‘I
decided to attempt a biography.’ The letter included a questionnaire in
the form of ‘notes for the guidance of contributors’ and asked for any letters,
memos, photographs, voice records or movie film. The biography, Thomson
explained, would be written so that 85 per cent was acceptable to the technically
interested with the remaining 15 per cent aimed at the more technically
orientated reader. The book, he added, ‘may be made the foundation of a
documentary film’.

The letters were on notepaper headed ‘Alan Dower Blumlein, a biography
by F. P. Thomson in association with Simon Blumlein’. Simon Blumlein had
agreed that Thomson should, on Simon’s behalf, hold all material submitted.
The guidance notes were referred to as ‘a formal request’ in addition to
the more general requests to be published by magazines. Please reply by
30 November, 1972, recipients of the letter were urged, and they were given
18 points on which to respond.

In December 1972, Thomson told one correspondent that ‘a large number’
of people had responded and there were already ‘unexpected surprises of
great historical interest’.

In September 1973, Wireless World magazine carried a letter from audio
expert Rex Baldock, organiser of the BKSTS seminar in 1968, suggesting that
anyone with information on Alan Blumlein should contact Thomson, and gave
Thomson’s Watford address. In 1972, R. W. Burns, then a graduate student
at Leicester University, found it necessary to abandon a year’s work on
a PhD thesis on Blumlein when he heard from Thomson of Thomson’s own plans
to produce a biography.

In June 1977, at the unveiling of a plaque on the house in Ealing where
Blumlein once lived, Thomson gave a speech in which he told how he had been
‘persuaded to write a biography’. By 1981 he said he had accumulated about
one-and-a-half hundredweight of material and traced Blumlein’s ancestry
back to the early 15th century.

In 1982, in the 40th anniversary year of Blumlein’s death, Wireless
World reported Thomson as saying that he expected his biography on Blumlein
to be published in mid-1984 and had ‘found some very interesting material
about Blumlein’s father and maternal grandfather who had much influence
on him’ and that ‘research into the family has taken him into such fields
as mediaeval tapestry when he found the coat of arms of the Blumlein family
of Strasbourg in a 500 year old tapestry’.

Anyone seeking guidance from Who’s Who on the whereabouts of Thomson’s
biography is likely to end up very puzzled.

In the 1982 edition the entry for Francis Thomson lists books on banking
and tapestry, and a biography (with Simon Blumlein) entitled A. D. Blumlein,
(1903-42): inventor extraordinary. Publication date was given as 1977. But
when I contacted the British Library it could find no trace of any biography
on Blumlein, by anyone, and Thomson has consistently declined to identify
any published work.

Thomson’s entry in the next edition of Who’s Who referred to Engineer
Extraordinary: a Biography of Alan Dower Blumlein. This time, the entry
omitted any mention of Simon Blumlein and gave the publication date as 1983.
In the 1984 edition, all reference to Blumlein had disappeared. Even the
most recent issue remains silent.

Simon Blumlein has waited patiently for a biography of his father but
now says he is ‘very concerned’. It is 18 years since Thomson began making
private and public calls for biographical material, using Simon Blumlein’s
name and with the Blumlein family’s blessing. No book has appeared, and
Thomson still holds the material collected.

Early this year, Thomson was blaming an unnamed publisher for the delay
on a biography. Soon afterwards he said that unification of the EC in 1992
will ‘so completely turn the public’s attention away’ as to make publication
of a biography in 1992 ‘a wasted effort’. He then promised a ‘bang’ in ‘virtually
every country globally at a time suitable’. Next Thomson claimed to have
written ‘five biographies of Blumlein’ and that ‘Mark IV went to the publishers
months ago’. But he consistently declines to say who is publishing the book
and when.

Simon Blumlein is especially worried because he has seen the biographer
go off at a tangent which distressed his mother, the inventor’s widow, who
died recently. By delving back deep into Alan Blumlein’s ancestry, Thomson
has unearthed distant and tenuous links between the two families and is
now drawing parallels at both great-grandfather and junior school level.
These, Thomson says, ‘have enabled me to piece together an important basis
to account for his genius’.

Recently the biographer has revealed that he is researching ‘the probable
meeting and changes made in South African native policy as a result of a
meeting between A. D. Blumlein’s maternal grandfather and the brother of
SA Prime Minister Sir Leander Starr Jameson, when both were in King William’s
Town, the former for a great conference of SA’s principal ministers of religion,
and where he was detained as a result of contracting crippling cellulitis
(erisipelis – in those days often fatal)’. Thomson notes that his mother,
before marriage, was governess to the Jameson family in South Africa.

Simon Blumlein is also concerned that he does not know what biographical
material has been supplied to Thomson, and by whom, and what will happen
to it in the future. Some of the people who supplied material for the book
are believed now to be dead.

Although Thomson still declines to indicate a likely publication date
for his biography of Alan Blumlein, he has given an indication of his plans
for the material he has collected as a result of the calls made in 1972.
His comments are unlikely to reassure historians.

‘Five years ago,’ reveals a letter last December from the F. P. Thomson
Archives for the Alan Dower Blumlein (1903-1942) Biography and Family History,
‘Mr F. P. Thomson OBE, CEng, MIEE, Hon FISTC was offered a minimum of one
and three quarter million US dollars by an American organisation for the
Blumlein Archives and in addition free residence in Boston, Mass, if, for
four years in the 1990s, he would host science seminars at no cost to himself.
Mr Thomson’s part American ancestry made this hardheaded approach to his
long and painstaking Blumlein researches (at great expense to himself) a
much more fair attitude than the many approaches he has received from British
people who have treated him as a sort of charity which ought to disgorge
at his own expense the Blumlein memorabilia he has acquired and the research
notes he has made when exploring accuracy of some of the people who have
claimed association etc with A. D. Blumlein.’

Says Simon Blumlein: ‘I just want to see my father’s achievements more
widely recognised, which was the original aim of the biography. One of the
last things my mother told me was that she wanted that too. We want to be
sure that material submitted in good faith to Francis Thomson and myself
by people who knew my father is safe and secure and that bona fide researchers
can eventually be guaranteed access to it. We do not want to see the Blumlein
and Thomson families tenuously linked by ancestral coincidences. Apart from
anything else, it’s hard to see who, other than the biog rapher, could possibly
be interested in such matters.’